The Origins of the Ottoman Empire.

• Author: Murphey, Rhoads

The appearance of a version in English of a short book of essays, the primary purpose of which was, at the time of its first publication in French in 1935, to refute then current historiographic trends and interpretations of Ottoman history, might appear on the surface an event of merely antiquarian interest. However, despite the nearly six decades which have elapsed since Koprulu presented a synthesis of his ideas on the evolution of Turkish culture and on the level it had achieved circa 1300 when the Ottoman polity first made its appearance on the scene, the essays still make compelling reading. Koprulu was one of the pioneer researchers in the still obscure field of late medieval Turco-Persian culture of Anatolia under the Seljukids of Rum (1078-1308), and long before his summary statement of conclusions in the lectures and essays published in 1935, he had already published a series of detailed studies on related topics. In his 1935 book, entitled Les Origines de l'empire ottoman, he makes frequent allusion to the findings of these previous studies. It is apparent that the main outlines of the argument he develops in Les natolia in the second half of the thirteenth century, these ancient cultural traditions of the Turks had as yet been little disturbed.

The implicit assumption against which Koprulu's scholarly work had fought most vociferously and consistently, and to which his 1935 essays were also characteristically addressed, was the idea that the Oghuz Turks who flocked to Ertughril's and (after 1288) to Osman's banners were not only political refugees who had been forced to flee their lands after the Mongols tightened their grip over central and eastern Anatolia following the victory at Kosedag in 1243 and, so to speak, nouveaux arrives, but also cultural innocents who lacked longstanding traditions of their own. The reality of the former state, i.e., material deracination, was a matter of historical record and difficult to deny. The assumption of accompanying spiritual poverty and a state of noble savagery that presented a sort of tabula rasa upon which superior cultures (i.e., Christianity, which the nomads encountered along the frontier with the Byzantine capital in exile at Nicea) could write at will, or which offered an ideal target for all-encompassing faiths and ideologies such as militant Islam, was strenuously rejected by Koprulu. In Les Origines, as in a number of his earlier studies, Koprulu set out to prove that the Turks did not exist in a cultural vacuum circa 1250 and that in fact they were newcomers to neither Byzantine Christian culture - which they had known since the time of the first Seljukid incursions into Anatolia in the late 11th century - nor to Islam, which they had confronted since the Transoxanian and Transcaucasian conquests of the caliphal armies in the early decades of the 8th century, especially under the Umayyad Caliph al-Walid (705-15). To pretend otherwise was, Koprulu insisted, the height of historical naivete. His work on the language and literature, as well as traditions of rule and political institutions, of the Turks had always stressed the synthetic nature and syncretic quality of "Turkic" culture, composed of tripartite elements which included Middle Eastern/Iranian traditions borrowed from the Sassanids and their successors, ancient Turkic traditions inherited from the Gok Turks and their successors, and Arab-Islamic traditions transmitted by the Umayyads, the Abbasids, and their successors.

Following similar premises to the ones outlined...